Microsoft Monitoring How Long You Use Windows 10 (betanews.com)

Mark Wilson writes: The various privacy concerns surrounding Windows 10 have received a lot of coverage in the media, but it seems that there are ever more secrets coming to light. The Threshold 2 Update did nothing to curtail privacy invasion, and the latest Windows 10 installation figures show that Microsoft is also monitoring how long people are using the operating system. This might seem like a slightly strange statistic for Microsoft to keep track of, but the company knows how long, collectively, Windows 10 has been running on computers around the world. To have reached this figure (11 billion hours in December, apparently) Microsoft must have been logging individuals' usage times. Intrigued, we contacted Microsoft to find out what on earth is going on.

Comments

Re:If it weren't for games

[webmistressrachel]

Exactly.

And the article notes (via a link) that Microsoft previously published the number of years in total that games have been played on Windows 10 to date, a more precise metric than uptime even - so of course they know! LOL @ anyone who upgraded to 8 or 10, and trusted the update mechanism at all! Sturdy firewall, sensible usage, physically protect the network. Simple.

Re:They are not "monitoring" you

[Ol Olsoc]

I was waiting for this MIcrosoft is teh awesome! people

From their privacy policy:

If you open a file, we may collect information about the file, the application used to open the file, and how long it takes any use [of] it for purposes such as improving performance, or [if you] enter text, we may collect typed characters, and use them for purposes such as improving autocomplete and spell check features. A fucking key logger! You are giving the keys to the Kingdom away to Microsoft, and you're going to reply that somehow you aren't.

Re:Or maybe they guessed

[AmiMoJo]

*sigh*. This is why it's so hard to get reliable information about Windows 10. Most of it is just wild speculation that doesn't stand up to scrutiny, invented to create clickbait headlines.